Appendix B. Reporting Bugs and Requesting Enhancements

Sad to say, no version of GIMP has yet been absolutely perfect. Even sadder, it is likely that no version ever will be. In spite of all efforts to make everything work, a program as complicated as GIMP is bound to screw things up occasionally, or even crash.

But the fact that bugs are unavoidable does not mean that they should be passively accepted. If you find a bug in GIMP, the developers would like to know about it so they can at least try to fix it.

Suppose, then, that you have found a bug, or at least think you have: you try to do something, and the results are not what you expect. What should you do? How should you report it?

	Tip
	The procedure for making an enhancement request—that is, for asking the developers to add a missing feature—is the same as the procedure for reporting a bug.

In common with many other free software projects, GIMP uses a bug-reporting mechanism called GitLab. This is a very powerful web-based system, capable of managing thousands of bug reports without losing track. In fact, GIMP shares its GitLab database with the entire Gnome project.

1. Making sure it’s a Bug

The first thing you should do, before reporting a bug, is to make an effort to verify that what you are seeing really is a bug. It is hard to give a method for doing this that applies to all situations, but reading the documentation will often be useful, and discussing the question on IRC or on Discourse may also be quite helpful. If you are seeing a crash, as opposed to mere misbehavior, the odds that it is a true bug are pretty high: well written software programs are not designed to crash under any circumstances. In any case, if you have made a conscious effort to decide whether it is really a bug, and at the end still aren’t sure, then please go ahead and report it: the worst that can happen is that you will waste a bit of time for the development team.

	Note
	Actually there are a few things that are known to cause GIMP to crash but have turned out to be too inconvenient to be worth fixing. One of them is asking GIMP to do something that requires vast amounts of memory, such as creating an image one million pixels on a side.

You should also make sure that you are using an up-to-date version of GIMP: reporting bugs that have already been fixed is just a waste of everybody’s time. (GIMP 1 is no longer maintained, so if you use it and find bugs, either upgrade to GIMP 2 or live with them.) Particularly if you are using the development version of GIMP, make sure that you can see the bug in the latest release before filing a report.

If after due consideration you still think you have a legitimate bug report or enhancement request, the next step is to go to GIMP’s list of issues (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/issues/), and try to see whether somebody else has already reported the same thing.

Find a Specific Bug

Enter some (space separated) search terms, e.g.

filter crash

in the “Search or filter results…” text box and press Enter. By default you only see open reports; you can change this by clicking “All” above the search field.

The result is either a list of bug reports – hopefully not too long – or a message saying “Sorry, your filter produced no results”. If you don’t find a related bug report by doing this, it may be worth trying another search with different terms. If in spite of your best efforts, you file a bug report and it ends up being closed as a duplicate, don’t be too upset: it has happened repeatedly to the author of this documentation.